 Welcome to Barbell Logic. Rewind. Hey, Barbell Logic listeners. 2020 Matt here. Scott and I thought it would be a good idea when we recorded this podcast to, you know, record it on an airplane. Seemed like a good idea at the time. Now, for the re-release, we had our amazing podcast producer, Stephen work his magic to make the audio as good as possible, but it is still on an airplane. And so we know the audio quality falls short of our current standards and what you've come to expect from us. But that being said, I felt the content of this podcast was important enough to re-release it with this series. So I hope you enjoy and just think about how funny it was to see probably Scott and I sitting next to each other holding the old, you know, Baptist church microphones on an airplane recording a podcast surrounded by other people. So have fun with this episode. We're on an airplane on our way to the east coast, kind of the east coast, steel country. That's right. We left Tulsa and we're on the way to Charlotte right now. And when our American airlines fly, we got the exit row. We couldn't get any first class, but that's okay. Books, the first class. And so we just want to talk a little bit. One of the things I want to talk about is how to know when you're actually ready for intermediate or advanced programming. And I mean, like late intermediate and advanced programming or even mid intermediate. And I would argue that most people who think they're ready for intermediate and advanced programming aren't. Yeah, we did it episode on how to stop fooling yourself about recovery or the truth about recovery. And then we talked about the three questions in there. So that's, that's a big, that those are, those are three big tools you can use to figure out if you're done with LP. But sometimes even those don't tell us the full story, right? Like, like, I'll get a new client and he says, Hey man, I'm done with LP and I need help with intermediate programming. And then we start working together and having to do three more weeks of LP. Yeah. I just had a guy, Nick Hammer. So I'll shout out to Nick. Nick is an excellent lifter for sure. An advanced lifter. So he is definitely advanced lifter, right? He's got a cool name. Yeah. Nick Hammer. The guy squats in excess of 600 pounds. He deadlifts almost 700 pounds. This is all raw, right? And this is in the, oh, the US APL has got the weird 105 kilo or whatever it is. Like, he's like 231 or whatever that class is. And so somebody over there has got yeah, somebody's got tuberculosis on the plane. No. And so, you know, Nick came in as an excellent lifter, but he had some form issues. And so because he had form issues, what we did was we put him on LP and I put him on a four day split LP. So he did two upper body days and two lower body days and we LP'd him. And, uh, and so he's, he's still doing, he just did a set of five on his deadlift at 585. Right. So like, definitionally, he's not a novice. No. But he can still benefit in this situation. From novice programming. Yeah. That's exactly right. And then when I'm done with that, I'm not going to immediately put him on an eight week or 12 week program. I'm going to continue to make gains for him weekly because I don't know if he's ever done that in his own training, right? I've just started coaching him a few months ago. And so if he's never done weekly training, I'm going to continue to push that and manage his stress with weekly based training so that the weight goes up every week and when it can, it'll be every two weeks. And when it can't, we'll go to monthly and then eventually do that stuff. Now the thing about him, because you can tell based on his weight, he can't be a novice, right? Nor is he an earlier me. The guy's got excellent body awareness. I can, I can watch his videos and make some changes, give him some cues. And he comes back the next session and he crushes them. I mean, he can do it exactly every single time. So the guy's squatting six in the way he's 108 kilos or whatever the heck it is. Like, there's no way he's a novice. There's no way, right? He's not. And yet he's just using LP. Yeah. And why is it comes back again to that minimum effective dose for maximum return on investment. I can very quantifiably see with linear progression, novice-based programming, that he's getting better every session because the weight on the bar continues to go up while his form is getting better. Okay. So in two respects, he's getting better. The weight and the form. Yeah, exactly right. And so once I get to an eight week program or a 12 week program, I really only have true quantifiable results at the end of that program. When you peek him. When I peek him, right? Which is probably going to be for a competition or a mock meet or whatever. But right now I need a quicker feedback loop for him. Nearly every one of those people that have signed up who thought they weren't a novice, we put them on LP. Yeah. And we put them on LP. It just is going to be faster, right? So LP might last three weeks, might last a month, just about every single person that who thinks they're at one spot in their programming or in their training advancement, we almost always back them up a little bit. And then they then respond back to us usually within three weeks or a month. They can't believe the progress that they made on this sort of training when they thought they were no longer novice. And you know, we've got little tricks that we use to kind of, you know, so we might change the rep scheme from three sets of five to five sets of three. It's the same amount of volume, but we're able to continue to make the weight go up. We clean up little things with their form. Well, like you said, putting Nick on a four day split. Yep. Of linear progression. Yeah. So I'll put him on a four day split linear progression instead of, I mean, you think about this, like a guy who's doing, so Nick's doing, you know, 365 for sets of five on bench press. And he's never, he's really never pressed. He's a powerless. So that's another thing as a, as a, for press as strong as that guy is, he's definitely a novice. So he just passed a 200 pounds for his, for his reps. Well, the guy's got a 400 pound bench press or an over 400 pound bench press, but he's only pressing 200 for reps. And so we're trying to bring it as a matter of fact, every time he presses right now, does an upper body workout, he presses first and bench presses second because we're trying to catch up his press. So 300 is coming. So those are the kind of things that we do that we can actually continue to get people to make advancement in the most simple way possible. So the first thing I would tell people is if you can make weekly progression, if you can add five pounds to your squat every Friday or two and a half pounds every Friday to a lift, there's no reason to do an eight week or 12 week program or five sets of five. And it's not because any of those things are bad. They're not, they're actually great. Like there's a, the day is coming when you're going to have to do four sets of five or five sets of five or six sets of five or a 12 week program. But if we can make progress without doing those things, that would be nice. Yeah. By the way, can you tell I'm getting a horse? I can. I taught a bit at the seminar all weekend and did a bunch of lecturing and coaching. And I did the press platform. I mean, I coached a bunch, you know, I taught a bunch of lectures and the platforms this weekend. And by the end of that press platform, I was awfully raspy. I sounded like I've been smoking sigs for a while. You know, I just recently had a form breakthrough, you know, and so when that happened, that didn't, that sort of kicked off a round of LP for me. Like we're like, Oh God, some stuff clicked. Yeah. You know, we can, we can, we can race ahead here. And so we did a little LP on my squat and added, I don't know, 20 pounds or something to my favorite PR or something in a couple of weeks on the squat. And at this point in my game, that's, I don't know, that's probably what I did last year. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. And then I had a little form breakthrough and just super profitable. And we talked about this too. Like if you get sick or you go on vacation, I just came back from a several week layoff from vacation and had some crazy business stuff going on, ended up coming back in and doing LP. Well, I mean, I've trained for 25 years and I'm still going to LP first. Right. Yeah. I'm old. I'm old. But you know, and then we also talk about training advancement is based on recovery. But if you're a 45 year old guy, 50 year old guy who thinks he's a advanced lifter and you're squatting 155 for your sets of five, you're not an advanced lifter. And so it doesn't mean like, I mean, something's wrong. I mean, something's wrong. So let's talk about that. People ask all the time, like social media, they're like, where should my way to be when I get out of LP? Like I'm a dude, you know, what's the normal? And of course, you know, I never really want to give them that answer. I never want to give them that answer, but I think we can give them some rules though. I think we can say, if you're a guy and you weigh over 150 pounds and you're not squatting two and a quarter, I mean, that's very conservatively, conservatively say that you're not out of LP. No, it would be really rare for me to have a guy that ends LP under 265 25, 275 on their sets of five on a squat. I would say that that would go up to about 50 years old, almost anybody, almost any guy that doesn't have a birth defect. I'm not being funny there either. I mean, he literally doesn't have any health problems, no metabolic problems, hormonally normal under 50 will get to 265 275 285 on LP. Yep. I'd say the middle of the bell curve gets the 305. Yeah. I'd agree. And some people will get to 375 405, 400 pounds on a linear progression, which is going to require a body weight over 200 pounds for sure is really, really good. Most guys end in the threes. Most guys end in the threes. If you're skinny or you're old and you end between 250 and 300, that's perfectly okay. But if you're under 250 to 225 250, you're under that, you're not a novice. But that's the squad. So like presses almost any dude, almost any dude under 50 is going to get to like 115, I'd say. Yeah. Yeah. That's conservative, I would say. And so if your numbers are under that, if you're deadlifts under 350 for sets of five, I would say conservatively, you're not done with LP for ladies. I guess we should get some ladies numbers, right? If they're not squatting 175, what do you think? Yeah, somewhere in there. I think ladies have a wider range of performance. Yeah, they do. They're based on body weights and athleticism. 150 to 175 squat for sure for LP presses are really all over the place, right? So I see a lot of women in their presses at like 65, 67 and a half. And you see other women that go right to 105, like no problem. So that's, it would be hard to tell you a press number. Deadlifts. I mean, man, almost everybody can deadlift over 200 pounds as a female, 200, 205, 225 somewhere in there. 225 would be good to end your LP on, but 200 pounds, 190 is pretty standard. A diminutive lady might be 185, and these are all people under 50. So that brings up something more about LP. I've gone on about like, hey, you're 35, you're old in terms of this, right? Well, if somebody's over 55, I often find, and they haven't been training very long, I often find that we just never get them out of LP, man. Now, if somebody's been training for a long time, let's say they got started at age 40 and now they're 55, we'll get that person deep into some more complex training. But somebody that just got started at maybe age 54 or 56 or something like that, we're going to run LP for two or three months and they're going to get the flu, or they're going to go on vacation, or they're going to break their ankle. Yeah. Go see their grandkids for Christmas, right? Going on cruise. And then we're right back in and again. Certainly there are a lot of middle-aged people who are, if they're consistent, they're really consistent, we'll definitely get them into weekly based programming, right? So we'll get them into kind of an old man, Texas method or like a heavy light medium or something like that. But there are a lot of people that are 55 to 70 or 55 plus who will never get out of LP. And it's not, there's not even anything wrong with that, right? So I talk about Sibyl all the time. Sibyl is 82 years old. She trains pretty damn consistently. And I don't know if she'll ever get out of LP because there's still things like, she goes to Oregon and she watches her grandkids for 10 days. And when she's out there, she either doesn't train or she'll go see Jordan Stanton, one of our coaches at SSOC. She'll see him for one session. She did a cruise on the Queen Mary. That was like 10 days. She misses that. Those are all good reasons to detrain. Yeah, they're great. Although, yeah, they'll detrain. So there's detrain. And then she comes back and we got to back her off 15% and start running back up. And there's nothing wrong with that at all. As a matter of fact, now that she's deadlifting right around 150 pounds and she's 82 years old, if I could just maintain a 150 pound deadlift and until she dies, which will be like when she's 105 or 107, then, you know, Before you die. Yeah, or I die. I'll leave me. You know, yeah, I've just imagined if you're a female in your 80s and you're deadlifting 135 or over, that's pretty strong for your age. It's probably strong enough for anything that life's going to throw at you at that age. And so, you know, she'll never do any sort of Texas method variant or heavy light medium. There's days where she doesn't feel very good and we start to train and I can tell like the real heavy set of fives just isn't there and we'll do a lighter day and we'll just get a little more volume in if that's the case. But ultimately, I don't need to periodize her and put her on any sort of advanced sort of program. And even though she's been training now for two and a half years, we probably need to unpack why that happens. The main reason that that happens is we already alluded to it is they detrain so quickly. A 70 year old person, a 60 year old person, they miss seven calendar days and they've detrained a little bit. You know, a young guy maybe has to miss 12 or 14 days before we need to think about. Yes, they're not going to miss seven days if you're young and you actually get stronger because the fatigue dissipates, you know. Yeah, but an older person, they miss seven days and we're going to have to reset five, eight, 10% maybe depending on how old they are, maybe more. Yeah, sure. And then it takes them a longer time to make up five, eight, 10%. You know, they're making ladies one pounds and two pounds. It takes them a long time to get back and then then it's Christmas and they leave again. So here we go again. Sure. Yeah. So certainly applies to an older population, right? Which again, we coach plenty of young people, but our wheelhouse are our middle age folks and we've got a lot of old folks. And so if you're 25 or 32, this stuff doesn't really apply to you. You ought to be able to get yourself out of LP and then on to weekly programming and then so on and so forth. But if you're a middle age person or below and you haven't hit those strength numbers we're talking about, then there is a problem and we need to figure out what's going on to continue to drive your LP and make, you know, make sure you're eating enough, make sure your form is correct. Again, form is a big one. If you don't have a coach, the forms checked up, you're going to die quicker on the LP. The LP is going to die quicker. You're not going to get that. But for older populations, for these older populations, you have to understand, and that's who we coach. Yeah. And not only is it who we coach, that's really who trains like how many people are 29 years old and younger. Like most of the population is over 30 years old. And so we don't have any stats to bear this out. But if you just think about it, I bet that the average person that's handling barbells are wants to get stronger. The average age is probably really, really close to 40. Yeah. Mid to upper thirties, I'd say. So if that's the case and, and so if you think about what percentage of the people that we coach are middle age or over, say 80%, right? 80% of our, Here's my rant, everybody. I got to do it again. Well, I think expectancy for me, I was born in 1974. I think the last time I look was 76 years old. I was supposed to be dead before I hit 77. Yeah. Divide that by two 36. Right. That's middle age. Yeah. That's right. So, yeah. So middle age is 35 and over. Yeah. What percentage of our people that are 35 and over? Well, 75 or 80% for sure. So if that's the case, then you've got some special populations sort of programming variables that we've got to play with there. So it's not, it's not easy to get into an eight to 12 week program. If you're over 45, it's pretty rare actually that we've seen somebody doing like a block or a DUP or, or any of those, you know, even a program like that's not ours, like a, like a shiko or a small love or a, you know, any of that, any of that kind of stuff, all of those programs are fine. There's nothing wrong. Like there's times when those programs are appropriate for the right demographic. The problem is, is that it's rarely right for somebody over 45. Even an advanced lifter is going to struggle with those sort of things because the recovery issues are such that they're dealing with things that younger people don't deal with. And a lot of them are just dealing with life, right? There's just life happens and job career changes happen and divorces happen and your kids get married or graduate high school or, and it throws them off a little bit and then we've got to make another run at LP. And so if I can make progress on LP, even after I have run an LP or even several LPs and I come back from a break and run LP and make progress, I'm going to do that. That's easy. If I can make progress on weekly programming, even though like clear, like anybody that would knows me, no, I'm an advanced lifter. I can't do weekly programming that long, but as long as I can do weekly programming and make progress, that's what I'm going to do. And so then when I can't do that anymore, that's when I'll get to the point where I'm at doing eight to 12 week programs and start bringing in that volume, all those things that, that have to be done in the program. The length of the workout goes from an hour and 20 minutes to two and a half hours, to three hours. So lady two rows in front of us, just, just like tossed her baby up in the air, like playing with it and bounce the kid's head off of the luggage. Now the kid's priming in the background. She's got a cheap cushion. She bounced it soft spot with the lights above her. Oh my God. Poor baby. Yeah. The good news is that kids got scholarships now. American Airlines really love it when I can put a guy back in the linear progression because I said earlier, it's so easy. Well, it's really hard for them to do, but it's really easy to program and it's effective. And so we love it when we can do that. I'd agree. So we'll continue to do these programs about this more advanced programming, but we just keep having to issue these caveats that say, gosh, we're going to talk about this intermediate programming, but chances are you're not ready. Yeah. Yeah. You need to know what's coming because I want you to see that box top of the puzzle, so that you understand where your puzzle piece right now fits in. And for most of our listeners, they're going to be looking forward into the future to go like, okay, this is something I'm shooting for. I'll get here. But as long as I can make progress on the thing that's more simple, or the thing that is a better minimum effective dose for that maximum return investment, why would you do the more complicated? You shouldn't. The last point I want to make before we blog this completely to death is that this is what it's going to look like if you get hurt. This is what it's going to look like if you get sick. This is what it's going to look like when you have a go on vacation. You know, people worry about that. How do I come back? What are we going to do? Hey, coach, what's up? You know, I'm going to be, I'm going to be in Costa Rica and then I got a hilarious worms and I'm sick and now I have Lyme disease. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to put you in LB until it doesn't work anymore. And good news is, is LB simple. It's familiar for the lifter. They know what's expected. And then the next time you run it and then the next time and the next time, you always end up higher than you did the first trip. So it's awesome. Yeah. It's fun for sure. Yep. Agreed. So there is our first podcast from 30,000 feet. You know, Reynolds and I both run in businesses and live in different states. And we just got to record these when we can. He's getting ready to go to Hawaii and be gone for weeks and weeks. So we won't be able to record. So we're trying to get these in the can. So bear with us with this audio quality. We bought some good mics and got a pretty cool little travel rig here. Yeah. There'll be background noise. I'm sure it's cool as much as they can, but plus it's cool that we're recording a podcast on an airplane. That's right. It's fun. The dream come true. That's right.